What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the familiarity of consumers with a particular product or service. Brand awareness is valuable when it comes to marketing or promoting a business, especially if it’s in its early stages.
Whether you own a start-up or a well-established business, your brand needs to be out there, and people need to be familiar with your brand name. That awareness or familiarity is fundamental to your business, especially in these times when we shop more online than in stores. No need to go to a store to purchase goods or services.
A consumer can easily find or discover new products when going through an aisle at a supermarket; that way, a product is identified and made known to most people who go to the supermarket. However, it isn’t the same when trying to purchase a product online, as people only search for a specific brand name.
Creating awareness to make your brand a popular household name would be best. There is just so much competition online. It would help if you made your way to the top.
However, if you like to gauge with numbers, to know the statistics, brand awareness isn’t measured in standard numerals. It is what you could call a vague concept. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. On the contrary, it has much significance, like search engine optimisation or content marketing. For your business to grow, you need all the possible available tools to help you market your brand.
Trust and Loyalty – Why Brand Awareness Is Important
The business world is now where consumers strongly depend on research and other consumers’ opinions on a product before making purchases. Their findings will eventually build trust, which is everything. That trust, once established, builds loyalty. So your customers keep coming to you without second thoughts.
Once you’ve established that trust, give your brand a personality, tell a story behind it, and make it fit for business and worth patronising.
What It Does
Brand awareness associates actions and products with particular brands. For instance, when buying sneakers, you say that you are a Nike person or an Adidas person. See what happened there; you associated your sneakers’ purchase action with a brand name. Another example, which is common in Nigeria, is calling any brand or kind of mayonnaise ‘Bama’ because of the famous brand, ‘Bama’ or all brands of toothpaste called ‘Macleans’ because of the renowned brand. We often do it subconsciously because that awareness and familiarity have been established already.
You can do that to your brand as well. Make it so popular it becomes a ritual for people to call your brand. That awareness becomes your marketing tool.
It creates brand equity. Brand equity describes a brand’s value determined by consumer experiences and overall brand perceptions. It is then your job to create positive experiences to get positive notions.
Positive brand equity leads to
- Higher prices due to higher perceived value.
- Higher stock price
- The ability to expand the business through product or service line extensions
- More significant social impact due to brand name value
Brand awareness creates recognition by a customer without assistance, leading to a product or service purchase, and that customer begins to prefer similar brands. It also establishes loyalty that a customer recommends your products or services to family and friends.
Now, To Build Brand Awareness
To build a brand awareness that will have a long-lasting impact on your customers:
- Be a person, not a company. You should define it as more than just a company that sells things. Let your brand show traits that will determine your success.
- To become famous, you should promote even things that aren’t related to your brand. You’ve got social media to do that. Interact with the audience, comment, post, and ask questions. Operate your page like it wasn’t meant for business. Show yourself more on social platforms. Research shows that over 50% of brand reputation comes from online interactions. Being social leads to greater awareness and being known.
- Tell a narrative. Creating a story around your brand gives something for the audience to relate to. It connects you and your brand with why the market should choose it.
It’s a good marketing strategy.
Here is a short read on Social Media Marketing.
If you ever need someone to create your brand stories, we at Raven and Macaw will create those stories and even market your brand for you.
- Whatever product you are offering, make sharing your products easy for your customers. Whether blog posts, videos, sponsored content or social media posts, make them shareable for your audience.
Word–of–mouth marketing is a very effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. Very sure this applies to you too. When someone sees a family, a friend, or even a trusted person sharing and recommending your products, services, or brand, they will likely try you. It creates a chain-like market. One shares clips with another, and it grows longer. Imagine how far a ‘click to share’ can take your brand.
Let it be your aim in business to make an impact. How you impact your customers’ lives will determine how far you want to go in a part of their lives, gaining their loyalty.
Here are some Brand Awareness strategies to help you:
- First, try to co-market with another brand to build an audience and, along the way, use the other brand’s audience to market.
- Advertise everywhere possible. create a presence that will not let you disappear
- Hire a face or a mascot for the company. If you can afford a celebrity’s face, it’s ok. Go ahead.
- Choose an image or symbol that represents you
- Create a short, catchy slogan
Now you can build your brand and start creating awareness for your brand. Let people know that you are open for business.
Click here to learn about Digital Marketing, its types, and its benefits to your business.
